ChinaDaily, Reuters, and The New York Times are all independently claiming that Lenovo is gearing up to take Motorola off of Google's hands. Reports peg the sale at $3 billion. Google originally paid $12.5 billion for Motorola and sold off the set-top box division for $2.35 billion, so if the reports are true, Google would be taking a hit of about $7 billion.

Motorola has been losing money, but a turnaround seemed to be in full swing. Google had sold off the parts of Motorola it didn't want, including the aforementioned set-top box division and a few factories, while cutting a significant amount of the staff. Google installed its own executives at the top of the company, and it hired the former head of DARPA to run the R&D department. Google seemed to understand the task ahead of it, repeatedly stating that turning around Motorola would involve clearing an "18-month pipeline" of work-in-progress devices—Google only took over Motorola in May 2012.

Recent products, like the Moto X and Moto G, were well-received and even innovative, and the CEO of Motorola recently talked about building a $50 smartphone. If Google does sell Motorola for $3 billion, it will have taken a struggling company, done all the cleanup work, set it on a good trajectory, and still lost a ton of money.

Google earnings will be released at 4:30pm ET; hopefully we'll get more information then.

Update: Google has officially confirmed the rumors with a blog post and press release. The documents say the sale price is "approximately US $2.91 billion (subject to certain adjustments)."

Google justifies the sale by saying:

The smartphone market is super competitive, and to thrive it helps to be all-in when it comes to making mobile devices. It’s why we believe that Motorola will be better served by Lenovo—which has a rapidly growing smartphone business and is the largest (and fastest-growing) PC manufacturer in the world. This move will enable Google to devote our energy to driving innovation across the Android ecosystem, for the benefit of smartphone users everywhere. As a side note, this does not signal a larger shift for our other hardware efforts. The dynamics and maturity of the wearable and home markets, for example, are very different from that of the mobile industry. We’re excited by the opportunities to build amazing new products for users within these emerging ecosystems.

Google will retain Motorola's patents, which helps that $7 billion dollar difference sting a little less. The deal is still pending approval in the US and China, so until that happens, Google says it's "business as usual."

There are good reasons to believe it is true. Google owning Motorola is a conflict of interest with the other OEMs that Google licenses Android software to. Google may want to get rid of that conflict of interest, even if Motorola is not getting any unfair advantages over other OEMs.

The TLDR of this seems pretty obvious to me: the entire purpose of the Motorola purchase was to get those patents, and use them in litigation. Having done that, (for better or for worse) Google is cutting their losses, and moving on.

As a recent Moto X/Android adopter, I hope that the rumor, if true, doesn't detract from the future of a nicely-integrated little mobile platform. I guess it depends whether or not Lenovo values and nurtures the existing Motorola Mobility team.

Well, that was quicker than expected. I thought Google would bleed for a bit longer from the Motorola financial train wreck. Still, going to Lenovo might secure a long-term future for Motorola phones, provided they can get the company back to profitability.

So angry, I was this close to buying a Motorola. The problem is I have no idea about lenovo's competence or their ability to support the versions of android.

At this point I might switch to iOS just on the desire that my device will be at least somewhat supported in the future and not get stuck on Android 2.3 forever!

In terms of business competence, Lenovo is the most profitable maker of Windows PCs. On the Android front, they've been selling smartphones in China for years now. They're new to the US smartphone market, but not new to the smartphone market as a whole.

The good news is Google won't be dumping cheap phones on the market, destroying the competition that can only make money off the hardware. I'd hate to see HTC go under due to price erosion.

What are you talking about? HTC can't get people to take their phones when the carriers give them away. Marketing is everything and that's why Apple and Samsung are top of the heap. Apple is its own thing, but aside from marketing, there's very little reason Samsung should be the #1 Android manufacturer. It's not quality or innovation.

This as the potential to suck. I love my Moto X and was excited about seeing what Moto would be doing the next number of years, but sucked into a foreign company that operates as a standard profit-first business will probably not go well for the aspects of this phone I love. Hate to be a xenodick but I've owned a great number of phones from different manufacturers and the only ones that seemed to understand the human side of engineering were the American ones.

The downside of Google owning Motorola Mobility is that it puts Google in direct competition with it's other OEMs like Samsung, HTC, LG, Sony, etc.

Now Google can remove any perception that Motorola gets unfair treatment.

Maybe one or more other OEMs were complaining about this?

I guess Google did the calculations and determined that software licensing Google Apps to 3rd party handset makers was more profitable than going vertically oriented. With the rumor of them developing their own chips, they would have been prime to go really vertical. They're still locking in key applications though.

Then again, the cell phone market is moving at such a break neck speed perhaps the plans Google had for Motorola never materialized in the market. Google has been trying the shotgun approach to see what works and what doesn't in the market.

So Google bought Motorola for the patents and tried to litigate with them and got basically nothing. Now they are selling the company at a loss because they never planned to be a handset maker. Sounds like a good deal for Lenovo, but too bad it is not an American company buying Moto given its history.

On the flip side it will be very interesting to see what happens to Google and the other Android handset makers once the Rockstar trial starts. If Rockstar wins a significant injunction in the United States that will be quite a blow to Google and the Android ecosystem.

Ron Amadeo / Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work.